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OPINION

Ciliary signalling in cancer

Abstract

Although tumours initiate from oncogenic changes in a cancer cell, subsequent tumour progression and therapeutic response depend on interactions between the cancer cells and the tumour microenvironment (TME). The primary monocilium, or cilium, provides a spatially localized platform for signalling by Hedgehog, Notch, WNT and some receptor tyrosine kinase pathways and mechanosensation. Changes in ciliation of cancer cells and/or cells of the TME during tumour development enforce asymmetric intercellular signalling in the TME. Growing evidence indicates that some oncogenic signalling pathways as well as some targeted anticancer therapies induce ciliation, while others repress it. The links between the genomic profile of cancer cells, drug treatment and ciliary signalling in the TME likely affect tumour growth and therapeutic response.

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Fig. 1: Ciliary structure.
Fig. 2: Ciliary assembly and disassembly cycles.
Fig. 3: Ciliary signalling systems within tumours.
Fig. 4: Paracellular signalling defects involving cilia.

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Acknowledgements

The authors greatly regret that length limits prevented them from citing additional strong and pertinent studies. This work was supported by awards from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81402145 and 81672582), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province for Distinguished Young Scholars (BK20160013), the Top Talent of Innovative Research Team of Jiangsu Province, the Jiangsu Recruitment Program of Leading Creative and Entrepreneurial Talents and the Six Talent Peak Project from Government of Jiangsu Province 2015-SWYY-019 (to H.L.); by a subsidy of the Russian government to support the Program of Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal University (to A.A.K.); and by R01 DK108195 (to E.A.G.) and P30 CA006927 (to Fox Chase Cancer Center).

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Nature Reviews Cancer thanks L. B. Pedersen, Q. Zhong and the anonymous reviewer for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Liu, H., Kiseleva, A.A. & Golemis, E.A. Ciliary signalling in cancer. Nat Rev Cancer 18, 511–524 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-018-0023-6

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